Recent content by Gorgon Zee

For me, the answer is that I want to balance the fun factor in the options versus the cognitive effort to learn them. For games that I enjoy, Fate has universal rules that apply to everyone, and so a very low cognitive burden, but it does mean the options are less fun because they're all very...

I found it pretty fast to run combats and with experienced agents they did feel significantly high-powered. People were pushing opponents out windows, making called shots, using preparedness to activate traps, using MOS to do way over the top stuff (like jumping between helicopters) — that sort...

This is a very interesting example. About half the people find this a very cool mechanic and love it. But another half find that the implementation is a real problem. I was in the second group as I found myself annoyed by the mechanics and doing very non-genre things to avoid auto-failing future...

Heh. In all honestly, I don’t think I could run the same campaign for a decade even. I understand the appeal of the “I’ve been running the same D&D campaign since I was 12” guys, but for me it would be like always eating the same food for dinner. Sure, I like what I’m eating, but I’d miss out on...

I’ve run maybe 20-30 year+ long campaigns, and only three I abandoned. One was when I found that the material I was using was by an abusive person, and I felt incapable of continuing to read it. One was killed by Covid, and one was a Doctor Who campaign that I found just too hard to keep coming...

Actually, my original point was that LINEAR dice-rolling systems are easier for players intuition. D100 vs d20 is not an issue, it’s that if your (modified) skill is 80% you don’t need math to get a good feel for how likely you are to succeed, whereas if you are told you need to roll 2 6’s on 8...

Yeah, it’s very different. I’d not expect to land more than 3-5 hits against an equivalent fighter. Against an Olympic contender I know from experience my expectation was zero, plus or minus zero.

Not disagreeing with you — that’s why I like linear systems — there is no math to understand. Your skill is 80; you are 80% likely to succeed. No math (at least until you have to decide on extreme results!). I’m going to ignore your “unknown” adjective, because by definition, you cannot know...

For any dice mechanic, there is the distribution of the dice results, which typically are linear (e.g. d100), bell-curve (e.g. 3d6) , or some form of long-tailed (e.g. exploding dice). And then there is the mapping of numeric results to the game-world results, which can be varied, but generally...

Dr. Strangelove for me.

Of these, these are the ones I've played, listed in order of how much they have justified their title: 13th Age is the clear winner. I have run four multi-year campaigns, played in another one and have just started prepping for a new campaign with the latest edition. It's easily my favorite...

While evaluating creativity is hard, there seems to be a reasonable amount of evidence that an LLM can generate material that is perceived as more creative than that created by an average person for a given domain. However the issue is exactly what you have suggested above -- it's creative the...

So you have a citation for this? Because recent evidence is exactly the opposite: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/air-force-says-ai-tools-outperform-human-planners-in-battle-management-experiment/

Until I need the space for something I like more. It's entirely pragmatic based on available space.

True for a fair number of Indie games like DitV, My Life With Master, Agon, Hillfolk For more complex systems, I'll be honest -- I probably make more mistakes that alter or omit rules than I do deliberate choices. I just found out yesterday that my belief that cultural maximums in Pendragon...